A commercial telecommunications network operated by a service provider supports voice and data communications between customer locations and includes an access network and a core network. Generally, customer devices communicatively couple to the access network, which in turn connects to the core network. The access network includes what many people refer to as “the last mile,” that is, the connectivity from a customer location, such as an office building, to a point where a service provider has significant facilities, such as a metro hub or a “service edge” at the periphery of the core network. In contrast to the access network, the core network usually provides transport of large aggregate flows over long distances and handles the selective routing of each customer's voice and data traffic to other locations served by the network. The access network generally comprises a series of switches, aggregators, multiplexers, demultiplexers, routers, hubs, and the like which collectively serve to provide connectivity between customers' equipment and the core network.
Customer sites in the vicinity of a service provider's edge, or an intermediate hub that provides connection to the service edge, must be connected to the service edge via some form of access circuit. Traditionally, it has been more practical for a core network service provider to operate a few strategically placed facilities to serve a large number of customers in a metropolitan area rather than to extend the service provider's core network to every physical location where customers may reside. Providing access services between a customer's location and a metro hub or a service edge may involve installing electrical or optical cables between the service provider and the customer site. In some cases, the service provider installs and owns this access link connected directly to the customer location. More often, however, the existing facilities of a local telephone carrier are leased to provide this connectivity. The well-established local telephone facilities provide at least twisted-pair subscriber loop connectivity to virtually every potential customer location in a metropolitan area. In the case of larger business locations and multi-tenant commercial sites, local telephone facilities typically comprise a large quantity of telephone wires or broadband access to the sites.
The services required by customers, residential or business, vary greatly in the type of access services, bandwidth, quality of service (QoS), type of legacy equipment, and the like. Types of services typically include frame relay services, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) services, broadband services, point-to-point private line services, voice services, and the like. Typically, the access network provides transport, aggregation, grooming, and switching for each of these types of services independently, which in turn requires the access service provider to provision each of these services separately. Each type of service utilizes different interface and framing standards, and in particular, each type of service typically utilizes different sets of protocols. As a result, current switches must be equipped to interface with and evaluate flows for each type of interface for which the switch is expected to route.
Accordingly, there is a need to reduce the burden associated with supporting the various types of services throughout the access network and to aggregate traffic prior to transmitting the traffic through the access network.